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Re: Social Committee proposal



On Thu, 25 Jan 2007, Josip Rodin wrote:
> I also think that a social committee would be a good idea.
> Even if unrefined and/or undefined, just the notion of having both
> a technical and a social committee would indicate major progress in
> our way of thinking.

I like the principle, but IMHO it should just be a DPL board or something
similar. Otherwise I really don't see the point of the committee.

A good board would integrate people from the various important offices
(listmasters, ftpmasters, DSA, security, RM, DAM, ...) but that shouldn't be
mandatory.

It's much simpler to take important decisions within a board: when you're
alone as DPL, you fear taking the wrong decision and end up taking no
decision. Within a board, it only needs one person motivated enough to
bring an issue to a vote and get a result that is way stronger.

With such a team you also have a broader coverage of the Debian community,
and potential problems can be discovered more quickly.

I blogged on the topic in the past:
http://www.ouaza.com/wordpress/2006/09/04/steering-committee-or-board/

> As far as 6.2. Composition is concerned, I would think that the soc-ctte
> should be allowed to be rather large, growing comparably to the growth of
> the developer body. After all, its emphasis can't really be on leadership, I
> would think that we would want to have a decent sample of the developer body
> in it.

In that case, you need to have decision mechanism that scales accordingly:
votes are open for a short period of time (let's say 4 days) and the
quorum for a vote ought to be relatively slow because on a large group,
you'll have always 1/3rd to 50% who are on business trip, on vacation,
busy, whatever.

> Maybe the limit should be a third of the election quorum, or
> sqrt(number-of-devels)/2? Currently that would be 16 people. I think that's
> a good sample of people, and a workable audience for a mailing list (of
> soc-ctte). Even if we expand twice in size, that's still just 23 people
> (i.e. the ctte would not grow twice as large).

I find that number rather large. Around ten people ought be enough. But
then I don't mind trying :)

I would like if we could bring such a proposition to vote before the DPL
election of this year (because of the obvious consequences on the election
itself).

Cheers,
-- 
Raphaël Hertzog

Premier livre français sur Debian GNU/Linux :
http://www.ouaza.com/livre/admin-debian/



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